I’m currently facing a dilemma. Right now, I have a synology NAS that I use to host my homelab containers (*arr, pi-hole, vaultwarden, Plex, etc).
I am planning to offload as much of that as possible to a dedicated machine, which hopefully will allow me to continue self-hosting even more demanding services (Immich, etc).
I was lucky enough to get a proper server - Supermicro, for free, with 64GB Ram DDR4 and 1TB. However, I plugged it in and that thing is NOISY.
My rack will be in the home office, where I will spend at least 8 hours a day, so I can’t afford that level of noise.
What should I do? Should I try to sell the supermicro and buy something else with that money? Should I keep the RAM and SSD (and CPUs?) and build something else with them? Are there any quiet servers I could look into (I am guessing better performance but more expensive), or Should I go the MiniPC route instead (cheaper and smaller, but more limited specs)?
Just for your information, I’m running Immich on an old Optiplex and it does work without demanding a lot of power. Yes, if you import your library, it will take some time to process everything. But after that is done, the amount of computing you’ll need is actually near nothing. Processing the images is a one-time job. And if you’re not going around taking thousands of pictures every day, Immich will not demand much power. Most of the time it sits idle while not new pictures are uploaded and nobody looks at the pictures.
(it’s the same with Plex or Jellyfin BTW: If you’re not running the server for your extended family, you get away with cheap hardware)